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Preedit writes "Not only is Mac clone maker Psystar continuing to defy Apple's ban on third-party Leopard installations, it's supporting the hardware with updates. Psystar Mac clones shipped as of Monday will include a 'service pack' that features fixes for a range of problems, some of them inherent in Apple's own software, according to InformationWeek. The fixes address a range of troubles, from glitches in Apple's Time Machine backup feature to quirks in the Keyboard Viewer and Character Palette entries in Leopard's system preferences menu. There's also support for the latest version of Java and other updates. According to the story, by offering a full menu of support, Psystar appears to be daring Apple to attempt to enforce provisions in the Leopard license agreement that forbid third-party installations and sales." We've beendiscussing Psystar clones for a while.

Do you have any information to actually back this up or are you just making things up? Why in your view is the operation "shady"? Apple is overpriced because they can be. They are on x86 architecture now so they don't really have an excuse. You CAN compare them to similar spec'd PC hardware to see how overpriced they are.

Apple is unlikely to sue Psystar. Apple would probably lose; Apple's EULA is an "illegal tying arrangement" under antitrust law. Psystar is tiny, but a court loss would encourage bigger players to start making clones.

More likely, Apple will stop selling their OS as a boxed product.

Uhh... and how would Mac owners upgrade to the latest OS? Download how many gigabytes of files that make up Leopard?? Oh yeah... I got hours to sit around and wait for that to complete.

Think before you post.

Same way countless other software companies have done, by shipping an "Upgrade Only" version that requires you to have a legitimate install before upgrading.

Ability to replace the video card? Technically, check. It can be replaced as it's a separate module.

Really? So in effect it cannot be upgraded you stupid fuck.

BECAUSE MOST PEOPLE DON'T GIVE A SHIT. Geeks need to get that through their obstinate skulls.

Really? I work at a tier-1 research university and I'm catching hell about non-upgradeable iMacs all the time from researchers, students, staff members, etc. Some are gamers, some are power users, and some are geeks.

So... you're a fucking idiot, right along with all of the other "Steve can do no wrong" assholes. There is a sizable market for a mini-tower mac.. full stop. Just because you and other current Mac owners say there's not does not make it so. You can keep clicking your heels together willing it to be, but reality intrudes.

There are gamers, Unix workstation users, and others who do not want to dump 2500 plus into a relatively underpowered (for the money) Mac Pro. And to say that gamers are a niche market.. well.. that's just a lie by a self-deluding Mactard.

If you are referring to the EFI emulator, remember that it does not circumvent DRM. It emulates EFI on Bios Motherboards. EFI is NOT a copy protection method nor was it ever designed to be. It is a replacement for bios.

It may not be, but they can do any number of technological restrictions in the name of preventing piracy.

Encrypted binaries fit in there, especially since the key is sitting in the SMC chip, which only real macs have.

Eventually breaking those restrictions, whatever they may be in the future if anything, may run afoul of the DMCA, in which case it is no longer a license issue. Somewhat like breaking DRM to use music on the device of your choice, this would be breaking locks on the OS to use it on the hardware of your choice, and both would technically violate the DMCA...right?

I have yet to see Apple laptops cost more than comparable ones from Dell etc.

The cheaper ones i have seen typically use Celeron processors, or older P-M procs, they aren't comparable at all.

It pissed me off at one point, i was trying to convince a friend NOT to get a Macbook and i spent quite a bit of time custom configuring laptops from Dell and HP and could never get one comparable to a Macbook for cheaper.

Psystar/Open Computing is reselling a full (read: fully-licesned) copy of MacOSX Leopard. They are then preinstalling it onto the system, telling you that they do modifications, and telling you that the copy is no longer under warranty. In addition, the courts have been moving in the direction of saying EULA's are not necessarily contractual, because of the low barrier of people to click "I Accept", weakening any potential Apple case.

To be fair, DMCA is vague on modifying software for personal use, and violating license, but only from the perspective of "taking away revenue". In this case, Apple is getting attributed as creating the software, and sells a retail copy of Leopard every time Psystar/Open Computing sells one to buyers.

What it boils down to is that running Leopard on a machine that Apple did not make violates the EULA. EULA's are largely NOT legally enforceable, and in those states where they are the degree to which they are varies widely. EULA's are not active contracts, and are largely invalid because you cannot read them in entirety (or at all usually) on the packaging before making your purchase, leaving you vulnerable to stipulations that were unknown at the time of purchase. EULA's are legally weak, all but entirely unenforceable, and would be outrageously expensive to attempt to enforce on any type of broad scale.

Basically I think Apple really would have to pay to play this game that it might lose. EULA's are largely flawed and usually unenforceable. Will be interesting to see what Apple does, if not nothing.

They don't have a consumer desktop line, which is what a whole lot of people and companies want.

I disagree. The only entities I see bemoaning the lack of an "xMac" (a modestly-powered headless upgradeable desktop Mac) are some geeks on sites like Slashdot and Ars Technica. I don't see any desire whatsoever from Joe and Jane Consumer, who are Apple's target market.

stats released this week by market watcher DisplaySearch. HP shipped 20.1 per cent of all the laptops that left manufacturer warehouses in Q4 2007. Second-placed Acer took 15.9 per cent, Dell 14 per cent. Filling out the top five were Toshiba (8.6 per cent) and Lenovo (8.2 per cent).

Asus accounted for 4.7 per cent of shipments - 1.56m units, of which the best part of 350,000 were Eee PCs by the vendor's own numbers. That total is up 50 per cent on Q4 2006's tally. Only HP matched that year-on-year growth rate, literally so, while most other laptop sellers saw percentage growth increases in the thirties.

Apple was up near the top of the growth chart, with shipments up 38 per cent year on year, second only to HP and Asus, and on a par with Lenovo.

The Mac maker shipped 1.34m MacBooks and MacBook Pros in Q4 2007, well below HP's 6.66m, Acer's 5.25m, Dell's 4.64m, Toshiba's 2.86m and Lenovo's 2.73m. It share came to 4.1 per cent, putting it ninth in the share chart, behind these five, Fujitsu-Siemens, Sony and Asus.

So Windows is unstable because Microsoft has to support many different hardware configurations. Then what about Linux? Linux supports maaaaaybe 4 or 8 times more hardware than Windows. Maybe even 10 oe 20 times more. Yet Linux is more stable than Windows. No the reason Linux and Mac OS and Solaris and BSD and, well every other OS is more stable than Windows is because it has a more resonable design. The worst thing you can do in software design is make every part tightly couopled to every other part. That is what Windows has done to itself.

It's quite clear you don't understand any of this enough to comment....

iTunes sells iPods. Period. The app itself doesn't do much other than manage music and video to put on devices, mostly the iPod, but also random other 3rd party players in the OS X version. The store has no purpose whatsoever but to provide content for the hardware they sell, which in turn helps sell more of it.

OS X isn't even close to being "just BSD", the windowing system is a complete replacement, the toolkits are 100% in house developed, they aren't even using BSD init, nor inetd or cron, because they developed launchd to replace them all.

They use FBSD code in the kernel for the network stack, for POSIX syscall behavior, sysv IPC and some other low level stuff. The majority of the code running in the kernel space is not from the FBSD project though, and much of it predates FBSDs existence entirely. The majority of the software running on an OS X machine has nothing to do with BSD, if you were to rip out all the Apple developed stuff you aren't left with a BSD system, you are left with a non-functional bunch of code.

Safari is not Konqueror in any way, at all, it is another in-house application that happens to use WebKit as a rendering engine, which Apple seems to have done better developing than the original developers had in the first place.

I'm not sure whether to take that hostile response seriously or not. You want more details? Boot Camp will help set up the partitions and boot loader so you can install Windows, and once Windows is installed you use the Leopard DVD to install the drivers. There isn't really anything more to it than that. I assume you want the hardware to work properly, so yes, you do want to use it.